On a recent one A trip to Giant Eagle, my local grocery store in Pittsburgh, I noticed something modern in the fruit aisle: a single pineapple packed in a pink and forest green box. The front photo showed a pineapple cut open, revealing pink flesh. Touted as the “jewel of the jungle”, the fruit was the Pinkglow pineapple, the brainchild of American food giant Fresh Del Monte. It cost $9.99, just over twice the price of a regular yellow pineapple.
I put the box in my cart, took a photo with my phone, and shared my find with my foodie friends. I mentioned that its color was the result of genetic modification – the box said “bioengineered” – but that didn’t seem to worry anyone. When I brought Pinkglow to a Super Bowl party, people were moved and amazed by the color and then devoured it. It was juicier and less tart than a regular pineapple, and there was another difference: it had its distinctive crown cut off. Soon my friends were buying pink pineapples too. One of them used Pinkglow to brew homemade tepache, a fermented drink made from pineapple peels that was invented in pre-Columbian Mexico.
With orange cauliflower and white strawberries now a common sight in American grocery stores, a non-yellow pineapple doesn’t seem so out of place. Still, I wondered: why now with a flashy presentation? And why pink? And why did me and my friends do it in the first place?
When I brought it my questions to Hans Sauter, director of sustainability at Fresh Del Monte and senior vice president of research and development and agricultural services, began with a brief history of this fruit. You may assume, as I did, that pineapples have always been sweet and radiant in color, but that wasn’t the case before the 1990s. Store-bought pineapples of yesteryear had a green shell and featherlight yellow flesh that was often more tart than sweet. Buying modern was a bit of a risk. “No one could really tell whether the fruit was ripe or not, and pineapples were mostly consumed as canned products because people could trust what they were eating there,” Sauter says. Adding sugar to some canned pineapples made it a sweeter and more consistent product.
In 1996, the company introduced Del Monte Gold Extra Sweet, yellower and less acidic than anything else on the market at the time. Pineapple sales have skyrocketed and consumer expectations of the fruit have changed forever. Gold’s popularity led to an international pineapple dispute when fruit rival Dole introduced its own variety. Del Monte sued, claiming that Dole essentially stole its Gold formula. The two companies settled out of court.
Sauter says that with the success of its Gold pineapple, Del Monte was looking for new characteristics that would make the pineapple even more attractive to consumers. But growing pineapples is a slow process; it may take two years or longer for a single plant to produce ripe fruit. Del Monte spent 30 years crossbreeding pineapples with specific desired characteristics before she was ready to launch the Gold variety. Sauter says the option of waiting another 30 years for a new variety “wasn’t an option.” So in 2005, the company turned to genetic engineering.
Del Monte had no intention of producing pink pineapple per se, but Sauter says there was consumer interest in the antioxidant-rich fruit at the time. (Acai bowls and pomegranate juice anyone?) Pineapples naturally convert a red-pink pigment called lycopene, which is rich in antioxidants, into the yellow pigment beta-carotene. (Lycopene gives tomatoes and watermelons their color.) Preventing this process can result in pink flesh and higher antioxidant content. The company has tasked its dedicated pineapple research team with finding a way to do just that.
The team developed a set of three modifications to the pineapple genome. They inserted DNA from a tangerine to obtain greater expression of lycopene. They added “silencing” RNA molecules to silence the pineapple’s lycopene-converting enzymes, which also helped reduce its acidity. (RNA silencing is the same technique used to produce non-browning GMO Arctic apples.) Finally, Del Monte added a gene from tobacco that confers resistance to certain herbicides, although company officials say this was simply so that scientists could confirm that other genetic changes have taken effect – not because Del Monte plans to employ these herbicides in production.